Prayer in the Life of the Diocesan Priest
by Richard McCullen, C.M.
I am sure most of you have recognized the character from Graham
Greene's novel Earlier, during the last
night of his life, the whiskey priest had made his confession to
God. His fellow priest, Padre Jose, the only other priest in town,
cowered by fear and by the woman he was living with, had failed to
come to the prison. In the course of his solitary confession, the
whiskey-priest had thought:
If I had only one soul to offer, so that I could say, Look what
I've done.... People had died for him, they had deserved a saint,
and a tinge of bitterness spread across his mind for their sake
that God hadn't thought fit to send them one. Padre Jose and me,
he thought, Padre Jose and me, and he took a drink again from the
brandy flask.
I don't imagine that there is a priest among us with the smallest
shred of honesty and authenticity who would not identify with many
of the sentiments of the whiskey priest on the morning of his
execution. And there is none of us who will not in his more calm
and reflective moments authenticate the conviction of Greene's
character-a conviction articulated earlier by the French writer
Leon Bloy- that there is only one tragedy in life: not being a
saint.
Not being a saint may be the only tragedy in life. Yet, if there
is one compliment more than another that we priests feel
embarrassed about and which leaves us groping for effective words
to reject, it is to hear ourselves described as saints. We know
that we are not saints. And I suppose that when we would list to
ourselves the reasons why the description of being a saint does
not fit, we might ultimately find ourselves saying: ". . . and I
am not the man of prayer that I know I am called to be."
A saint, almost by definition, is a person of deep and sustained
prayer- unless you prefer the definition given by Ambrose Bierce
in his : "A saint is a dead
sinner revised and edited." A saint is one who knows his or her
God more than by hearsay. And it is only through deep and
sustained prayer that anyone can come to know God more than by
hearsay.
The ability to pray with Christ and in His name is a seed that has
been implanted in all of us through the presence of the indwelling
Spirit of God. For a priest, it is a seed that received from the
Spirit of God a special culture when through ordination he was
configured in the depths of his being to Christ, Head and
Shepherd. In some, the seed seems to lie on the surface without
taking very deep root. With others, the seed enters more deeply
and takes root, and over a lifetime fruit is brought forth, some
thirty, some sixty, some a hundred-fold. With such, the love
language, which is at the heart and is the grammar of all prayer,
is developed with increasing proficiency.
As in so many areas of thought within the Church, the past 30
years have seen some marked shifts in the approach to prayer on
the part of the diocesan priest. One of those shifts could be said
to be reflected in a commonly voiced criticism of the formation
given on prayer in pre-Vatican II days.
One hears it said that the type of prayer, as indeed of
spirituality, that was offered in the Tridentine seminaries was
monastic in character; and being monastic, it was ill adapted to
the life to which a diocesan priest is called. There are elements
of truth in that criticism. However, one must always be mindful of
William Blake's observation that "to generalize is to be an
idiot," and to depreciate the whole pattern of formation for
prayer that one received in the Tridentine seminary as too
monastic is to run the risk of idiotically jettisoning some
elements that are perennial and essential if the priest is to
climb the mountain of prayer. More later on some of those
elements.
However, it must be said that the general shift of emphasis in the
approach to prayer on the part of the diocesan priest to which I
have referred was introduced and authenticated by the conciliar
decree itself on the ministry and life of priests. Indeed, the
shift is signaled clearly in the very title of that document:
Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests. If the priest is to
avoid the only tragedy in life-that of not being a saint-his way
to God and his prayer will lie through a deeply lived experience
of his ministry, an experience daily shared with Christ, Head and
Shepherd. And how can that experience so rich and kaleidoscopic
for every priest be shared with the Head and Shepherd if not by
some form of sustained reflective prayer? The point is made with
crystal clarity in , when Pope John Paul 11
writes:
In the Church, the primary ingredient of priestly identity is a
close relationship with Jesus Christ.... The priest's relationship
with Christ makes present and visible the Church's intimate
relationship with Christ.... It is through the sacred actions they
perform every day, as through their whole ministry which they
exercise in union with the bishop and their fellow priests, that
priests are set on the right course to perfection of life....
Priests will acquire holiness in their own distinctive way by
exercising their functions sincerely and tirelessly in the spirit
of Christ [nos. 1213].
Prayer, then, for the diocesan priest, is to grow out of his
experience of life, the whole of it. That calls for reflection as
well as a deepening of self-knowledge on the part of the priest.
In the process of prayer, the priest will be led by the Spirit to
perceive the reality around and within himself, and he will be
aided by the indwelling Spirit to interpret that experience with
his knowledge of and intimacy with Christ.
In the immediate post-conciliar years, there was a current of
spirituality that put, what I might call, practical action at the
center and did not show itself particularly partial to the
traditional form of meditation. We frequently heard phrases like
"Life is prayer" and "We meet God in our neighbor." Of course,
both of those sayings are true, but they were often used to
justify what I might call a "unilateral polarization."
One remembers John Robinson's and the thrust of
his thought that the authentic meeting with God takes place in the
moment of practical action. From that there developed pastoral
lines which concentrated very much on the transformation of
structures. At the risk of making one of William Blake's idiotic
generalizations, I might hazard saying that in the 1960s and '70s
there existed a sort of dichotomy between prayer and action in the
priesthood, resulting at times in a failure to integrate both into
the one following of Jesus Christ.
Indeed, I recall talking to one of the Spanish provincials of my
own congregation who in the 1980s confided to me that, when he had
been provincial in the late '60s and early '70s, he felt rather
self-conscious and experienced on occasion difficulty in speaking
to some of his communities about meditative prayer, so strong and
prevalent was a current of opinion that ran against many of the
traditional forms of prayer and meditation.
The rise of the charismatic prayer groups, the growth of interest
in forms such as centering prayer, the formation of meditation
groups-often indeed asked for, pioneered and directed by the
laity-contributed much to the recovery on the part of both priests
and laity of the importance of the sense of transcendence in
prayer.
Indeed, it might be asked if one of the dimensions that some
people claim is presently missing in the celebration of the
revised eucharistic liturgy may not, in part at least, be traced
back to the celebrant's lack of the sense of the transcendent.
Such a sense is won only when the priest has learned to support a
solitary silence before God, for it is the positive cultivation of
a certain solitude and silence as a prayer-value that opens up and
facilitates our entering into the mystery of God. It is the art
known to the psalmist when he counsels us to be still in order to
know that God is God, and to let God be God (cf. Ps 46:11).
The priest is invited to become familiar with the route that leads
to what Meister Eckhart called "the core of the soul." Indeed, the
same author would see that core as the place where the Word of God
is continually being born, and the entire ministry of the priest
centers upon that Word of God and its proclamation to the people
whom he is called to serve and to lead. Meister Eckhart observed
that the Word of God is spoken in the soul's most exalted place in
the core, yes, in the essence of the soul. The central silence is
there, where no creature may enter, nor any idea, and there the
soul neither thinks nor acts, nor entertains any idea, either of
itself or of anything else.... If God is to speak His Word to the
soul, it must be still and at peace, and then He will speak His
Word and give himself to the soul and not a mere idea. . . [Sermon
1, p. 96, Raymond Blakney (ed.)].
The importance of cultivating and capturing the sense of the
transcendent on the part of the priest is something that is
evident in that great pastoral and very human leader of God's
people, Moses. Moses was bidden to take his shoes off as he stood
before the burning bush. Entry into deep prayer entails "taking
our shoes off," a shedding of peripheral and selfish concerns, in
order that the heart can be more fully possessed by God. The point
I am making is well expressed by Graham Kings in a little poem
entitled "At Home With God":
I leave aside my shoes-my ambitions, / undo my watch-my timetable,
/ unclip my pen-my views, / put down my keys-my security, / to be
alone with You, the only true God. / After being with You, / I
take up my shoes-to walk in Your ways, / Strap on my watch-to live
in Your time, / put on my glasses-to look at Your world, / clip on
my pen-to write up Your thought, / pick up my keys-to open Your
doors.
Some of you may remember a program that was recorded a number of
years ago now by BBC Radio 4 of parts of a Mass celebrated by
Father Greene, a parish priest of the Diocese of Ardagh. Listening
to the program, I found myself wondering how much Father Greene
was aware of the presence of the radio team of British technicians
in his rural parish church on an Ash Wednesday and what they were
up to.
The liturgy of that particular Mass can only be described as
homely and informal, with peremptory instructions and admonitions,
delivered at unscheduled intervals in a rather gruff voice to the
altar boys. The parish choir was accompanied by a somewhat reedy,
if not wheezy, harmonium-and the singers did not always succeed in
sustaining pitch as they sang their way through "Soul of my
Saviour."
When the program of about 20 minutes length went out on the air,
it was heard by millions, and asked for by popular request to be
replayed on a number of occasions in subsequent years. What it
would seem was most memorable about the 20-minute broadcast, and
which presumably lay at the heart of its appeal to so many
Christians and non-Christians alike, was the authentic and
unaffected accents of reverence and of love with which Father
Greene addressed the Lord when he spoke directly to Him. Such
loving reverence could only have been won through knowing how to
speak as Moses did to God, as a friend, in the intimacy of his own
reflective, personal prayer.
To experience the transcendency of God in and through reflective,
meditative prayer, one must regularly leave the marketplace to
breathe a purer air and capture a larger vision. Such a larger
vision is caught from that higher ground whither the Spirit of God
will lead any priest who creates the conditions that allow His
whisperings to be heard.
In years that have seen much writing and discussion on the role
and identity of the priest, diocesan and religious; when priestly
seismographs have registered tremors of five and six degrees on
the Richter scale, with repeated aftershocks-the ultimate security
for the priest will only be found in the consciousness of a lived
and loving relationship with Jesus Christ cultivated in regular
reflective prayer.
That calls for a pondering upon, a mulling over and a gentle
wrestling with the word of the Gospel, as it presents the man
Christ Jesus-who, if we are sufficiently open, will
compassionately evaluate, enlighten and impregnate the actions and
reactions of our own priestly ministry. It calls for a measure of
discipline. It will demand the penciling in of a period in the day
when the priest will try to be alone with the Alone.
We may try to wriggle out of that particular discipline by saying
that it is a monastic practice, and not for diocesan priests. The
late Father Dalrymple -writer, spiritual director and parish
priest of the Edinburgh diocese-was fond of reminding diocesan
priests that when they are looking for a period for meditative
prayer in their day, they should consider an alternative to
reckoning time from rising to bedtime. The alternative is from
bedtime to rising.
If there is a genuine desire for some form of sustained prayer
that is more than superficial and perfunctory, a flexible but firm
structuring of time, I believe, is called for. That structure
could well be the measure of the authenticity of the desire for
deeper contact with the mind of Christ, the which
is the fragrance of the priesthood.
I recall reading in Owen Chadwick's biography of the saintly, and
sometimes rather eccentric, archbishop of Canterbury, Michael
Ramsey, how someone once remarked on his fidelity in trying to
find in his rather crowded day an unbroken half-hour for prayer,
usually in the morning time. The archbishop reacted with an
amiable smile, saying that he frequently found it was necessary to
spend 29 minutes in his chapel before he could elicit one prayer
that he felt went from his heart to the heart of God.
The contemporary and necessary adjustment that is taking place in
the vocation of the laity vis-a-vis that of the pastoral
priesthood has tended to undermine the confidence of some priests.
The adjustment that is being called for is ultimately theological
in nature. It has, of course, sociological dimensions, but it
falls primarily within the domain of the theologian.
Every priest has reason to have a measure of confidence in his
grasp of theology, for even if he has not done postgraduate
studies, he does have at least a basic qualification in theology.
As a theologian, then, a priest will recognize that the first and
fundamental act which gives tone to all theological work is
prayer. It was a saying of the ancient Fathers of the Church that
a theologian is one whose prayer is true. The roads that lead to
Zion are traced out in a priest's heart through prayer. And the
more familiar he becomes with those roads, the less threatened
will he feel by the laity who are called to walk with him and who
look to him as guide.
The diocesan priest is called to live out his days in a life-
giving tension of commuting between mountain and marketplace. It
is a tension that has its roots in the two-fold reason why Jesus
Christ chose the Twelve. In St. Mark's Gospel, we read: "And he
appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and
to be sent out to proclaim the message" (Mk 3:14).
The disciple-apostle is at once "to be with" Jesus and is "to be
sent out to proclaim the message." Being with the Lord and going
out in His name has to be lived as one surrender. The authenticity
of a priest's being "with the Lord" will be tested by his
effective desire to be sent to announce good news to the poor, to
give freedom to captives and sight to the blind.
For that reason, the prayer of the diocesan priest, as that of
Jesus Christ himself, cannot be a solitary cry of a man who is
concentrating on his own problems. It will be an invocation to the
common Father who makes His sun shine on the just and the unjust
alike. His prayer will be, as was the priestly prayer of Jesus
himself, peopled with people. It will be an authentic reflection
of his configuration through ordination to Christ-Head, Teacher
and Shepherd.
The image of the priest commuting between the mountain and the
marketplace evokes his mediatorial role that he shares with Him
who "is able for all time to save those who approach God through
him, since he always lives to make intercession for them" (Heb
7:25).
It is interesting to note that the Greek word
which we commonly translate as "intercede," carries the meaning of
meeting with someone, of being someone in relation to or on
behalf of others. So the priest's prayer means essentially being
with the Lord, putting himself in the presence of the Lord (Head
and Shepherd), wanting Him, letting heart and mind move toward
Him, with the needs of the parish, the community and the world on
his heart. His prayer will be a sort of rhythmic movement of his
personality into the eternity and peace of God-and into all the
resources that lie there-and back again into the turmoil of the
world, for whose sake he is seeking God.
People today are looking for priests who, through the experience
of authentic prayer, appear before them as men like the spies of
the Book of Numbers, carrying a cluster of grapes from the
Promised Land (Nm 13:23). There is piquancy in this observation of
Hans Urs von Balthasar:
The clergy, whether old or young, should make no mistake about it,
no matter how far the sermon has been prepared by the standards of
modern exegesis and of pastoral sociology (in case they still find
time for this), if it has not been achieved in personal prayer,
the congregation is fed stones instead of bread. And the faithful
have a very fine sense for whether the preacher's words come from
the depths of personal prayer or ultimately are as flat and as
vain as anything they might read in a newspaper [The Von Balthasar
Reader, p. 327].
The mediatorial aspect of the praying priesthood will surface to
the priest's consciousness when he takes into his hands the
Liturgy of the Hours-or as the French have titled one of its
volumes, "The Prayer of the Present Time." In a recently published
book on a remarkable priest of the Cashel diocese-whom I am sure
some of you have known, Father Jim Meehan-Father Benedict Kiely
contributes a poem as a concluding offering to the author's book.
Alluding to Father Meehan's taste in books, Father Kiely in his
poem makes Father Meehan say: "The only one where I read real love
between the lines / was the Office that I pushed out like a pram,
/ the bulging psalmody of priestly wombs, / along a country road
in summered calm."
The image of pushing the Office "out like a pram" is a rather
unusual one, but I think it may express what many priests feel
about the praying of what we still sometimes call the "Breviary."
Very often, we do have to push on when we come to pray the "Prayer
of the Church." It calls for effort and energy to pray the hours
of the Divine Office faithfully and in their entirety day in and
day out, year in and year out. One hears it said that a younger
generation of priests finds the Liturgy of the Hours heavy
reading, and not-at least in its totality -what in the mind of the
Church it is designed to be: a real pastoral and practical aid to
prayer.
Those of us who belong to an older generation of priests will
recall how, after receiving the sub-diaconate, as it then was,
with the obligation of reciting the Breviary, we may have carried
the volume around rather ostentatiously for a time-and among young
clerics, it would be jokingly referred to as the "wife." Many of
us, I imagine, found that the honeymoon with the Breviary passed
rather quickly.
Perhaps, however, thinking of ourselves as wedded to one's
Breviary had more to it than we realized. Leaving aside the
central truth that the Divine Office is an articulation of the
prayer of Christ by the Church, our attitude to the Divine Office
has the character of a relationship. Like all human relationships,
it must be worked at. It was Dr. Johnson who said: "A man, Sir,
should keep his friendships in constant repair." Our friendship
with the Divine Office needs to be kept in constant repair, if it
is not to end in separation or divorce. A priest who succeeds in
establishing over a lifetime a good, faithful relationship with
the prayer of the Church will be a praying priest.
In a conference to priests, the late Msgr. Ronald Knox once
compared the Psalms of the Breviary to the sword of Goliath that
David eagerly grasped when he was under pressure: "And David said,
there is none like that: give it me." Msgr. Knox concluded: "So
perhaps when you come to die, remembered phrases will come back to
you and you will arm yourself for that last passage with the
heavenly music. 'There is none like that,' your faltering lips
will mutter. 'There is none like that; give it me."'
In a word, prayer in the life of the diocesan priest can only be
said to be complete when he daily pushes out his Breviary like a
pram, searching for love in "the bulging psalmody of priestly
wombs."
It seemed to him, at the moment, that it would have been quite
easy to have been a saint. It would have only needed a little
self-restraint and a little courage. He felt like someone who has
missed happiness by seconds at an appointed place. He knew now
that at the end there was only one thing that counted-to be a
saint.
FATHER McCULLEN's talk, from which this article is adapted, was
given at All Hallows College, Drumcondra, Dublin, Ireland, in
February 1994, at a seminar on the priesthood. Upon obtaining
Father's permission, it was submitted for publication to The
Priest by Sister Mary Ellen Sheldon and Sister Eleanor McNabb of
the Daughters of Charity.
This article was taken from the June, 1996 issue of "The Priest".
To subscribe please write: "The Priest", Our Sunday Visitor
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